Wednesday, April 15, 2015

The Punishment Definitely Doesn't Fit the Crime

The Atlanta cheating fiasco was bad and the educators involved deserved license sanctions, but really.

The banksters who helped wreck the economy are allowed to get away with all kinds of shit, but educators of course are held to a far different standard.

It's the outrageous demands by politicians, particularly in D.C., that opened the floodgates to cheating by school districts.

I am sure Atlanta is just a drop in the bucket.

Well aware that the case is a damning condemnation of the Obama administration’s anti-education policies, sections of the political establishment cautioned Judge Baxter to avoid prison sentences. This includes former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, who said 20 years of emphasis on testing had warped public schools’ mission and set a “trap” for the educators.

In an opinion piece in the April 12 Atlanta Journal-Constitution, two of the judge’s predecessors on the Fulton County Superior Court bench, wrote, “Judge Baxter should exercise his tremendous discretion in imposing sentences which reflect that any conspiracy involves our entire educational system in the high-stakes testing arena. These educators did not create the system in which schools have been corrupted across this nation by making standardized tests the chief measure of school, teacher and student performance. Certainly, incarceration is neither mandated nor appropriate in this case.”

It's scapegoating, something that school districts have done to teachers for many, many years.

Someone in the comments section of the linked article pointed to this piece about what it is like to be a test scorer.